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Dr T. Chesters
Renaissance Humanism

Machiavelli: letter to Francesco Vettori:

- finds solace in a dialogue with the dead.

Humanism
the “others” to the human, e.g. the cannibals found upon discovering the New World: could
they be considered human?

Renaissance Humanism often celebrated by modern historians as a period of beauty,

discovery of the man etc. Also a darker side to it. Marxist critique of the period based on
exclusion often due to class.

What is Humanism?
- Misleading term: not an ‘actors’ category’ (Quentin Skinner). They don’t use it at the
time, it wasn’t. The term used by Georg Voigt in 1856 — retrospective coinage (same
with ‘Renaissance’) although “uumanista’/‘humanista’ was used occasionally
- later accretions carry slightly different meanings (secularism, atheism: e.g. BHA,
human-centred as opposed to God-Centred ethics).
- in the 16th Century it is possible to be a humanist and entirely devout
- ‘humanistae’ were scholars of classics as opposed to theology: they studied the pagan
texts of Ancient Greece and Rome, the ‘iterae humaniores'
- Definition 1: the belief in the value of the study and/or teaching of literae
humaniores
- ERGO there was a massive expansion in knowledge of ancient texts (mutili)
- in early sixteenth-century they made astonishing discoveries: Aristotle’s Poetics,
Cicero’s Ad familiares, works by Livy, Quintilian…)
- completely new authors were found: Homer, Sophocles, Lucian, Plutarch (all Greek)
and Tacitus, Catullus (Rome)
- idealisation of pure Latin (esp. Cicero) and Greek (esp. Pluto
- denigration of ‘late’ Latin of medieval scholasticism
- Medieval education was centred in Paris on the Sorbonne and it and the humanists
hated each other. It focused only on Aristotle from antiquity. Seven liberal arts: Trivium
(grammar, rhetoric, logic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy)
- HUMANISM moved away from traditional trivium and focused on:
- Grammar/Philology (restoration of Classical Greek and Latin)
- Rhetoric (persuasion: Cicero, Quintilian)
- Poetry (imitation of writers: Virgil, Horace; see the Pléiade)
- History (moral examples in political/military conduct; Plutarch)
- Moral Philosophy (the good life and how to achieve it; Senece)
- all geared towards a practical element to education: they were interested in practice
and making knowledge work in the real world
- Definition 2: promotion of an expanded trivium based on philology and the
language arts

Why now, in the sixteenth century?

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Dr T. Chesters
- influence of earlier Italian Humanism (e.g. Plutarch)
- Fall of Constantinople in 1453 - great geopolitical moment (islamic armies)
- many scholars took lots of their manuscripts with them
- first printing press (Guttenberg) c. 1440 then in Paris in c. 1470
- Military campaigns in Italy (1494-1559) - Montaigne’s father e.g. was a soldier in italy
and redecorated his house having seen the architecture, read Italian poetry etc.
Guillaume Budé (1467-1540), one of Rabelais’ great heroes and Montaigne’s
correspondent.
- studied fairly late which he reflects on rather mournfully
- founded the Collège de France (1530)
- published: De asse (Roman coinage); De philologia; De studio literarum recte
instituendo:
- see “into the light” - propaganda of the light which has come after the dark ages of
ignorance - the idea of emergence from that period
- he sees himself as belated in this new wave
- Rabelais echoes this in Gargantua

Humans, Semi-Humans and Monsters

What is specifically human about studying the classics?:
- these are the arts that the ancient Romans honoured: if you don’t study classics then
you’re not fully human: bonae literae
- attaining the idea of one’s species through understanding of the diving and the human
and ‘speaking properly’. If you can’t speak well then you are semi-human
- “it follows that one cannot call human, but monstrous, any life that is not founded on the
humane value of letters” !!!!
- without the classics one is semi-human OR EVEN monstrous
- there is a humanist ideal of openness, clarity and vision

Social and Economic factors

France in 1500:
- Rural but not subsistence (towns, villages, hamlets etc.)
- trade was in ‘cash crops’ - wool, flax, wine etc. regionally and internationally
- nobles’ chief income was from their land: rents from peasants etc.
- still largely feudal, little royal interference: decentralised polity
The Fourth Renaissance Discovery:
1 - printing
2 - nautical compass (thus New World)
3 - gunpowder and artillery
(first two are divine interventions and the devil invented artillery
4 - inflation: increase in prices
- static/declining prices at end of Middle Ages
- gradual/fluctuating by c.1600 (grain is 7 times higher that in c. 1500)
- wages however didn’t go up with the prices due to:
- monopolists (grain suppliers)
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- war debt
- American gold
- population growth/urbanisation
- Didn't affect the higher nobility who were so rich anyway or the merchant class
(sometimes benefited them)
- burden fell principally on the poor and the peasants who underwent higher
taxation (gabelle) and wages which didn’t keep up with rising prices
- **** burden also fell significantly on the lower nobility (rich but not super rich) who
depended on the rents of their peasantry and couldn't engage in trade themselves
(definition of noble in this period is that you can’t engage in trade)
- a new class: the Gentry/noblesse de robe who couldn't live off the land anymore
(incl. Ronsard and Montaigne)
- middle ground between bourgeoisie and noblesse d’épée
- Molière satirises the people who occupied this uncertain space
- they were different from the merchants who practiced ‘vile trade’ and the
noblesse d’épée who were just layabouts, did nothing and had no learning
- Humanists of the period often paint themselves as people who are fully
accomplished (ethic of work and production not to do with mercantilism): Budé
says that honour makes the arts prosper. Necessity for a certain amount of
leisure: have to be without worry etc. in order to write
- Humanism occupies or overlaps with this uncertain and social category:
- to be fully human implies not only a distinction in learning but in social
class

Further Reading:
- Artz, Frederick: Renaissance Humanism 1300-1550